Asset & inventory management serves as the basis for successful configuration management. Its purpose is to manage a company's IT assets and inventory data in addition to its software installations in an ITIL-compliant CMDB. All resources that are relevant to a company have to be automatically (as far as possible) discovered and tracked throughout their entire lifecycle (IT portfolio management).

But its not enough for a company to efficiently manage its large existing IT environment: IT systems today are constantly growing in size and complexity, which in turn calls for expensive hardware and software purchases and upgrades. What's more, licensing requirements regarding the use of software are becoming increasingly confusing. Consequently, this increases the demands placed on reliable IT asset & inventory management.

A company's software licenses are another important aspect of a comprehensive asset & inventory management approach. Software asset management deals with the management of existing licenses and tracks the number of software packages that are actually licensed. It checks whether the company needs to purchase additional licenses for software installations and determines if there are any underutilized software licenses.

With respect to the lifecycle of a company's IT assets, it is of paramount importance to know what exactly is in the portfolio. This overview then serves as a basis to plan the replacement or introduction of IT assets. This helps companies get much more precise answers to recurring questions regarding the planning, introduction, decommissioning, and maintenance of their hardware and software, which in turn is the key to an efficient IT portfolio management. In addition, it is much easier to detect and correct deviations from established company standards.

Medium-sized and large companies are often faced with the problem that they have to integrate large volumes of data from existing systems. This, however, will only work if an integration with different inventory tools exists. theGuard! CMDB provides a central database for all the information that is relevant to IT operation and uses the various theGuard! modules to carefully analyze available asset and inventory information. What's more, the automatic discovery of IT assets and inventories provides detailed results for the purpose of software asset and it portfolio management.